Songs from the story
Lira’s song
Choose the Morning
Henry’s song
What Time Allows
Henry & Lira Duet
What We Keep
Chapter 24 song Music video
In Time
The Last Leaf
Out now Available on Amazon
Lira
The hardest part of living forever is not losing everyone. It is choosing someone worth losing.
An immortal woman in a York bookshop. A mortal man who remembered her as a child, and still does.
For readers who finished The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and wanted the other version of the curse: not erasure. Being seen — and knowing it will end.
For more years than she likes to count, Lira Vale has survived by leaving before anyone notices she does not age.
Behind the counter of her ancient York bookshop, she has created a life built on careful routines, rotating identities, and locked rooms. She has loved before. She has borne children. She has watched every one of them grow old and die.
She will not make that mistake again.
Henry Calder remembers her.
As a lonely child in the 1980s, he spent his afternoons reading in the corner of Lira’s shop. When he returns to York forty years later, grieving his wife and settling his parents’ affairs, Lira looks exactly as she did when he was ten.
A collection of old books gives them a reason to work together. Their collaboration grows into a business, a friendship, and finally a love Lira has spent centuries refusing to want.
Henry knows she cannot grow old beside him.
Lira knows exactly how their story must end.
What neither understands is how completely a finite love can change an endless life.
Moving between present-day York and Los Angeles and the buried histories Lira has tried to forget, Lira is a restrained, deeply emotional story about mortality, memory, and what it means to be fully seen and chosen anyway.
Chapter 24 The City Between Them
Walk Lira’s York
A stylized literary map. The places and architecture are artistic interpretations, not a navigation map.
An illustrated companion to Chapter 24. The snickelway and The Last Leaf are fictional; the bench and lunch venue are unnamed. Locations and route are illustrative, not walking directions.
Forever is not the promise. Choosing each other is.